Fab at 48: After employing a tough diet and exercise regimen, Jenny Craig spokesmodel Valerie Bertinelli has lost more than 40 pounds.

And she’s showing off her new body–in a bikini, no less–on the cover of PEOPLE.

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Two years ago, the 5′4″ star was tipping the scales at 172 lbs., that’s more than 40 lbs. over her goal weight for her frame. But after just nine months of jogging, an healthier diet, and of course, Jenny Craig, Val’s down to 132 lbs.

Valerie hadn’t worn a bikini since she was 20 years old.

“I thought, If I’m so afraid of a bikini, there’s something wrong. And so I had to get back into one!,” the One Day at a Day star says in the new PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.

Valerie celebrates her 49th birthday April 23.

The One Day At A Time star will play a cattler rancher dealing with mad cow disease on an episode show creator David E. Kelley wrote especially for her..

The episode begins shooting October 7 and is scheduled to air in early November.

Valerie Bertinelli has inked a deal with CBS to develop a new talk show. The One Day at a Time star who has spent the better part of the week whoring out tales of cocaine use and her her loveless marriage with veteran rocker Eddie Van Halen, may be on the air as early as the 2009-2010 season. Valerie just-released a new tell-all book Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time.

Valerie Bertinelli continues chronicling tales of her Coke-snorting days on the Television Talk Show Chitlin Circuit with a Wednesday morning appearance on The View.

One day after Valerie Bertinelli’s explosive tell-all interview with Oprah, the cast of One Day at a Time, the series about a single mother raising two girls that made Valerie a star, reunited on Tuesday’s edition of the Today Show.

Former One Day at a Time star Valerie Bertinelli in a tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey.

Has there been a single child star in the history of showbusiness who hasn’t ended up on dope? In a tell-all interview on Monday’s Oprah, Valerie Bertinelli, the star of eighties sitcom “One Day at a Time,” will reveal that she cheated on her husband, rocker Eddie Van Halen, and snorted cocaine.

The interview airs the same day that Valerie’s motivational book, Losing It: And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time hits stores.

Oprah asks, “So you got married?”

And Valerie responds, “And pass out in the honeymoon suite…..I cheated, too. He claims to this day that I cheated first, but I don’t know. I don’t know about the timing.”